this intrigued the girls even more, intrigued and amused them, they were thirteen and fourteen and everything amused them. They rode home on the Third Avenue el, rattlebanging up Manhattan and through the Bronx, looking out the train windows into tenement apartments on both sides, hundreds of film-flickering lives shooting past their eyes forty feet above the street, and Rochelle might see an undershirted man leaning tousled out his window and, Maybe that's Fred F French, she'd say, he's had a streak of bad luck, ha ha, and that was the end of that, Klara said to Miles-they were in bed playing cards in the loft, until three or four years later when the girls left a high school dance with two boys who weren't even in their high school, interlopers from the north, and the four of them slipped into somebody's parked car at the dark end of the street and they puffed a couple of cigarettes and talked and smooched and necked and petted. Klara and one boy were huddled in the front seat and Rochelle had the other boy in the roomy rear, boy-crazy Rochelle putting on a show of tonguing and seat-slithering, actually raising dust from the upholstery, and she wore a smoky look that distracted the front-seat partners and made them stop and watch. There was just enough light to watch. And it went on toward the outer limits of what a girl is willing to commit herself to, even a boy-crazy minx like Rochelle. The boy in the backseat was in a bundled frenzy by now and Rochelle's look contained a complicated betrayal, it was smoky and deadly and cool and it seemed to be saying to Klara that their friendship, the best and deepest there could ever be, was about to enter a strange and disturbing phase, the intricate thing of men and sex and personal needs. There was a flurry of hands and knees, there was all that stuff of backseats and body angles and what you're wearing, the whole grabby flare-up of sex in the dark. She heard panty-band elastic snapping. She thought she heard the boy's finger actually enter the fleshy pocket between Rochelle's legs, a palpatory sea suck, the wetness, the slaver of long stupefying kisses, that whole thing of having a strand of his hair in your mouth that you can't exactly locate, and it was abruptly and bitterly clear that Rochelle had done this before, gone this far and more, and what a shock to Klara, detecting such experience in her best friend's eyes, and she watched in a clinical spell, she looked and listened-what a stark thing a secret is when it belongs to someone else.
Now she knew what people meant by experience, the way they used the word experience, and the form it took was not sex but knowledge, and the knowledge was not hers but her friend's-how it twisted her insides and made her feel puppyish and dumb.
She heard Rochelle mutter something like, Time to take the rubber out of your wallet, Bob, or she might have said Rob, but instead of a pale flexible sheath the boy took out his living thing, stiff and pulsing and ultraviolet, there it was, suddenly unbuttoned and in the world, pretty much the configuration Klara had imagined but so hot and real, independently alive, unyoked to the host, to the bearer, the wearer, and Rochelle was nervous because the boy did not have a rubber and Klara was nervous because the Japanese might invade China.
Miles cut the cards and listened.
And at the all-crucial moment Rochelle Abramowicz looked over the boy's shoulder into the eyes of Klara Sachs and said to her, thoughtfully, What do you think the F stands for?
And Klara said, What F?
And Rochelle said, The F in Fred F French.
This was a good thing to say, maybe it was the best thing anyone had ever said, then or now, under the circumstances, and it made them friends again. They dissolved, as the saying goes, in laughter, they practically disappeared into their constituent elements, into atoms and molecules, a couple of girls in a gangster Packard, blown forward in time, and Klara stood on the roof sipping tepid wine and hearing people say, We need theater, and she knew she would tell this story to Miles and she also knew she could never again have a friend like Rochelle or a mother like her mother for that matter and she looked across ledges and parapets to the old skyscraper with the massed midsection and the sunburst paneling, ten blocks north, and thought how wonderful it was, what an accidental marvel to come upon a memory floating at the level of a glazed mosaic high on a mid- town tower-the old spoked sun that brings you luck.
The poets of the old nations of the basin told stories about the wind.
Matt Shay sat in his cubbyhole in a concrete space about the size of a basketball court, somewhere under the gypsum hills of southern New Mexico.
This operation was called the Pocket.
There were people here who weren't sure whether they were doing weapons work. They were involved in exploratory research and didn't know exactly what happened to their findings, their simulations, the results they discovered or predicted. This is one of the underlying themes of the systems business, where all the work connects at levels and geographic points far removed from the desk toil and lab projects of the researchers.
Matt used to do consequence analysis, figuring out the lurid mathematics of a nuclear accident or limited exchange. He worked with data from real events. There was the thing that fell to earth on Albuquerque in 1957, a thermonuclear bomb of jumbo tonnage mistakenly released from a B-36-
He'd been in the Pocket for five months and was definitely doing weapons work but of the soft-core type, involved with safing mechanisms mainly, his face pressed to a computer screen. He wasn't sure how he felt about this. He'd wanted to do weapons, he'd wanted the edge, the identity, the sense of honing his silhouette, knowing himself a little better-a secret installation in the desert.
They named it the Pocket after a creature called the pocket gopher that lives in tunnels it frantically digs under the furrowed dunes.
The dune fields, the alkali flats, the whiteness, the whole white sea-bottomed world, the lines of white haze in the distance, the six-thousand-year-old mummified baby found in a cave near White City, yes, and there were animals that bleached themselves white over the eons, a once-brown mouse that color-matched itself to the gypsum drifts to escape the gaze of predators.
The wind blew out of the Organ Mountains, busting up to fifty miles an hour, refiguring the dunes and turning the sky an odd dangerous gray that seemed a type of white gone mad.
And the men and women of the Pocket, mainly men and mainly single, with only a small cluster of marrieds and their albino, was the joke, children-they lived in semiattached bungalows at the edge of the missile range and listened to the wind that the sages of the old nations spoke about, evolving metaphors and philosophies, and it recrested the dunes, blowing steadily, sometimes, for days.
Do you work with sound waves? Do you gauge the effects of blast on delivery aircraft? Do you do physics packages and dream about a girl back in Georgia, the one who put her hand in your pants at the drive-in near the swamp? Do you long to see a fireball, an actual test shot- they are outlawed of course by now, atmospheric blasts, but you wish you'd seen one of the monster shots that vapored an atoll way back when.
He ate lunch in the underground mess with Eric Deming, a tall shuffly man in his early thirties, a couple of years younger than Matt, and one of the bombheads.
There was a droop to Eric's shoulders and clothes. He tended to eat with his hands-french fries, sure, but also lettuce, beets, boiled rice, corn niblets, anything he could pincer and lift in units.
'When's Janet coming?'
'Soon. We're working out the details,' Matt said.
'Will you show her to us? We haven't seen a woman from the outside world.'
'You're in Alamogordo all the time.'
'That's not outside. You have to go a thousand miles before you're outside. You know that. In this state, Matty.'
'She's not coming here.'
'Okay but in this state do you know the percentage of people who have security clearance? Isn't that why we love it?'
'We're meeting somewhere west of here and then we're going camping. Remote remote remote. If I can talk her into it. She's not eager to do this, Janet.'
Eric worked in a lab area that Matt was not cleared to enter. He used to work with radioactive materials inside
